getting nodes without texts.

Question

$("br").parent().contents().each(function(i) {
   if(this.nodeType == "#Text")
    {
        alert(this.textContent);
    }
});

i am trying to select all texts not surrounded by html tags, but separated via <br>

doing this, sometimes returns a lot of alert messages, even when there should only be a couple.

i have tried to filter it out using

if(this.nodeValue != "") or if(this.textContent != "")

but still, empty alert messages pop up.

I suspect its the whitespaces in the html document (i dont control it). I only want to display this.textContent, which actually has visible text.

Answer 1

A text node's node type is 3, so:

$('br').parent().contents().each(function() {
    if ( this.nodeType == 3 ) {
      var text = (this.textContent ? this.textContent : this.innerText), temp = text.replace( /\s+/g, '')
        if ( temp.length ) {
            alert( text )
        }
    }
})

Live demo: http://jsbin.com/abalu